Sure, the easy route would be to just spend a few grand on a solid MGB or Fiat 124 Sport Spider and be done with it, but we pride ourselves on taking the difficult fork in the road at every opportunity. Therefore, we'll be avoiding Italy and the U.K. entirely, and setting our project-shopping sights on Japan and France. Here we go!

It just LOOKS scary. OK, fine, it really is scary. But hey, that Ventoux engine has a tube header!

When Renault decided to build an affordable convertible for the North American market, they opted to base their new car on the tiny Dauphine. Thus was the Renault Caravelle born, and the lines of the stodgy-yet-economical Dauphine were barely visible.

With output from the rear-mounted Ventoux engine varying between 37 and 55 hp, the Caravelle wasn't particularly fast even by the generous standards of the era, but it had French style and (if you bought the cabriolet) a roof that opened up to the sky. Sadly, these cars tended to rust quickly, parts were hard to find, and Americans weren't so good at performing the sort of maintenance that little European cars needed, and most of the Caravelles are gone now. However, the Hell Garage Demons can smell a French basket case challenging project across a continent, and they scared up this 1961 Renault Caravelle convertible in Alabama (go here if the listing disappears).

The very first word in the listing is "Rare," and yet the seller asks a mere $875 for this Caravelle. In the seller's own words, "I found this car and wanted to bring it back to it's glory." He won't, but you can! It looks pretty bad, but it appears to have most of the little trim bits that are so hard to find in half-century-old French cars, plus you get nicely reupholstered seats. The floor, well, she is gone ("the floor is flat and not difficult to replace"), but the convertible-top mechanism allegedly works. You get an 845cc engine with tube header, and it even turns over. You'll want to upgrade to the "big block" Cléon-Fonte engine, while you're dealing with all the rust… and paint… and interior… and so many other things.

We'll admit it, this car needs some work.

A rear-engined French convertible would be quite a project, just the sort of thing to turn a $15,000 investment into a $5,000 finished car. However, there were interesting things happening in the Japanese automotive industry in the 1960s, not least of which was the Datsun Fairlady aka Datsun Sports sports car. During this time, Nissan had moved from building Austin-based cars under license to producing their own designs (though there was still quite a bit of BMC genetic material in their engines), and the Fairlady combined semi-British styling with Japanese cheapness reliability.

These cars are worth plenty nowadays, and so in order to find a project with a price tag comparable to that of the Caravelle, we've had to look at the rougher end of the Fairladies-for-sale spectrum. Actually, we had to look at the "barely recognizable as a car" end of the spectrum, but there's no car project so daunting that the application of a firehose-like stream of cash can't set things right! With that in mind, here's a 1969 Datsun Sports 2000 in North Las Vegas (go here if the listing disappears), with an asking price of only $1,500.

Ahhhh, North Las Vegas; as Hunter Thompson wrote, "So once you get blacklisted on the Strip, for any reason at all, you either get out of town or retire to nurse your act along, on the cheap, in the shoddy limbo of North Vegas ... out there with the gunsels, the hustlers, the drug cripples and all the other losers. North Vegas, for instance, is where you go if you need to score smack before midnight with no references." Sure, this Datsun is missing most a few of its parts, all the paint appears to have been vaporized by nuclear tests at the nearby Nevada Test Site, and the interior looks like something out of a hobo jungle in Pahrump, but it comes with an "additional head." The "Rear quarters, floor pan and front fenders all have rust," but how bad could it be in arid Nevada?